My dear friend Reverend Marian Starnes was a spiritual powerhouse. A compassionate healer, a gifted medium, a loving friend to any in need. She founded The Brigade of Light and on the advice of an Angel named Gary (I’m not making this up) bought a property of 250 acres of pristine beauty on a [ Read More ]
There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t think about and miss my father. Perhaps it was the kindness that was so much his hallmark… perhaps it was his endless patience and his willingness to drop whatever he was doing to listen, to care, to act. “Want to read me a book, Papa?” [ Read More ]
Bronwyn at three and a half was already a Montessori scholar. Daily she trudged to an enlightened classroom where a teacher who genuinely liked children taught her how to scrub her desk with soapsuds, mess it up with fingerpaint and repeat the process. She was understandably enthralled. So much so, that Cee Cee at 2½ [ Read More ]
Do the people you love own certain times of your day – stalwart custodians of some magical clock? I never meet a day or a coffee pot without remembering the sound of my father’s voice in the early morning. I see him standing by the coffee pot, his greeting optimistic as dawn, cup in hand [ Read More ]
Shared history has immense power. I didn’t know how much until my divorce. It wasn’t only my future dreams that vanished with my husband, but the comfort of shared history that had been far more a source of strength for me than I’d realized. We were the same age, so we shared the same jargon, [ Read More ]
When I was about to get married for the first time, about a thousand years ago, a friend gave me an engagement gift of a reading with a famous astrologer for me and my fiancé. When I got to the astrologer’s house for my reading, I could see she was a tough old bird and [ Read More ]
There it was on top of the armoire, quiet in the dust of the years, the bright red newsboy cap that had been my Father’s favorite as long as I could remember. Like the tin soldier in Eugene Field’s poem Little Boy Blue, “awaiting the touch of a little hand, the smile of a little [ Read More ]
It occurred to me today, as I found myself standing in the middle of the family plot talking to the people I love who are no longer with me except in spirit and memory, that anyone not Irish might consider it odd to find comfort in a cemetery. Yet, I always do. I’d gone there [ Read More ]
5:00 a.m. It’s just me and the tree. The house is quiet. Nobody else loves the morning as I do, since my father’s gone. There’s snow on the ground and sleet has turned the trees outside to fairyland, ice palaces crisscrossing my front yard, transforming the winter-blue light into a magical dreamscape. I throw a [ Read More ]
I confess to feeling slightly foolish blogging about Titanic, but the phenomenon of Dakota and her pals going to see it in Imax 3-D – for their 34th lifetime viewing – set me to pondering what on earth could have precipitated that kind of devotion to a movie. OK. In the interest of full disclosure, [ Read More ]